Designing Impactful Green and Sustainable Chemistry Workshops for High School Teachers

A three-day workshop was designed and implemented with the goals of providing the training and the resources needed for high school teachers to incorporate green and sustainable chemistry into their high school chemistry classrooms. The workshop was structured to introduce the topics of sustainability and green chemistry, hands-on laboratory experiences with experiments that modeled these concepts, and personal work time for participants to develop a plan for incorporation into their own classrooms. The laboratory workshop content allowed teachers to explore green replacement experiments for traditionally hazardous high school laboratories with an emphasis on meeting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Novel polymer experiments, developed by the authors, were also performed as experiments illustrating modern approaches to sustainable plastics and how scientists are addressing the accumulation of plastics on land and in the ocean. Additionally, the polymer experiments offered a mechanism for inclusion of engineering principles into the curriculum. Lecture and laboratory content drew connections between the lesson plans and learning outcomes including the pillars of sustainability: (1) economic, (2) environmental, and (3) societal. These workshops were implemented in the state of Minnesota and attracted teachers from both rural and urban school districts. Continuing education credits were earned by all participants with the option to earn graduate credits. Feedback from three years of summer workshops (2017, 2018, and 2019) indicated nearly 100% satisfaction with the format, content, and leadership of the workshop.